Posts Tagged ‘Day Z’

Day Z‘s standalone release still isn’t upon us, unfortunately, and the conciliatory explanations in this video (below) suggest that it’s still some way off, too. Personally I’m content to wait, however, because it looks like Rocket and friends are taking time to add the kinds of detail that will make that wait worthwhile: Rocket explains the new animation systems and so on that work with the injury system, while Ivan talks new Chernarus: there’s a lot more going on in there.Read the rest of this entry »

VG247 got hold of Dean “Rocket” Hall at E3 and put a bunch of questions to him, as supplied by Reddit user DrBigMoney (if that is his real name), and you can see a video of that below. There’s a lot of detail in there about what the Standalone will entail.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Rocket “Dean” Hall was rocketing through DayZ standalone‘s development in order to stop rabid fans from sinking overeager fangs into his heels. But now I do know better! Rocket explained in a recent (and completely massive) dev blog: “We don’t know [when it’s coming out]. We’re going to take our time. I feel fantastic about the situation, more than ever I feel like we’re doing something really interesting with this development. Now is not the time to rush things, but we do need to ensure our pace is kept up.” He then proceeded to discuss all of the things – chief among them anti-cheat server technology, character customization, and the current closed test. Find out heaps more about the Z-est of days after the break.

DayZ‘s standalone version continues to be shrouded in real life’s most potent zombie fog – aka, mystery – but Rocket’s not the type to intentionally keep people in the dark. So he’s been trickling out details where he has them, and now we know that a closed test is “imminent.” But how exactly will it work? And what lies beyond – for instance, once players start flooding into nebulous “endgame” territory or. further, when ArmA III reawakens the ancient modder kraken currently sleeping in Rocket’s soul? Thanks to Reddit‘s eternally inquisitive hivemind, we now have answers.

DayZ Bounty‘s made a positively deafening amount of noise over the past couple days – and with good reason. In short, it’s a private server that players will eventually buy into using real money. Then they’ll get the chance to win it all back – and more – by killing zombies, survivors, and bandits. And while DayZ exists to encourage crazy emergent behavior, creator Dean “Rocket” Hall and the DayZ team think this is taking it a few steps (and dollars) too far. As such, the brains behind the wildly popular zombie mod have publicly stated that they plan to “ask that [DayZ Bounty] cease their activities in their current form.” However, speaking with RPS, Bounty’s creators were quick to point out a few key arguments in their favor: 1) no one from Bohemia/DayZ’s reached out to them, even though they’ve hollered in the DayZ team’s direction multiple times, 2) they’re not charging real money yet, and 3) their goal is to mod DayZ into an entirely different, more PVP-focused form. Apparently, this is only just the beginning.

As promised in the discussions of how the mod would develop in tandem with the standalone game, Day Z‘s mod version has been patched to 1.7.3 with contributions from the wider community (as opposed to just the original dev team.) Discussing the patch on the Day Z forums, Rocket posts a list of everyone who has contributed to the latest update, and encourages others to get involved: “There is much being done, new features and content. Official support is also being made available to community development team members for some requests, where possible.”

There are no new features in this patch, sadly, as it’s all bug fixes and tweaks, and although dogs are “in” they’re no workable yet due to some missing features. Dogs, it seems, will have their day(z).

That headline doesn’t refer to the times when games break and throw up oddball bugs for our amusement, but rather when games throw so many problems at the player that they become a sort of jeopardy-based experience in crisis-juggling. Earlier today I was running through my game collection and thinking about what I might like to play. It wasn’t Dishonored. Three things other stood out: Day Z, FTL, and X-Com. I began to think about what those had in common which, and what that said about my enjoyment of this year’s immersive masterpiece.

I once read a suggestion by conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, that you could drop all of culture into two broad categories (I paraphrase): “High culture”, which is best appreciated with some formal education about what is going on with it (difficult literature, opera) and “Low Culture”, which is basically everything in folk, primitive, and pop culture, for which education is not required. Sounds stupid and elitist, doesn’t it? Scruton himself admits many caveats, as I recall. It’s clearly impossible to create two such categories. But recently, well, I’ve started to think that perhaps he’s right about the education thing. At least when it comes to videogames.

I speak with reference to this FT article about a non-gamer judging videogames, and subsequent defences of the same. Actually, no, I don’t think we really need to worry about what non-gamers think of games. And that is because, in this instance, we are the highly educated elite.

For a while, it seemed like Day Z and Arma II would be one of those hair-pulling, plate-flinging couples that never musters the guts to actually make a clean break. “Oh, I’m really leaving this time,” Day Z would bellow, hesitantly hokey pokeying its way out the door. “Yep. Here I goooooo.” And then… nothing. Moving on, after all, is tough – especially when the old relationship was comfortable and also supplied you with all of your vital organs, which you’re now in the process of clawing from your stomach to replace with new ones. I think we’ve all been there. But now, Rocket’s given standalone Day Z’s alpha a release window, and it’s right around the corner. So then, let’s take a look inside, shall we?

It’s been a little while since I’d caught up with the rolling experiment that is Dean Hall and the Day Z project, so it was interesting to watch the Eurogamer Expo talk given by him, which I have posted below. In it it talks about “authenticity, tension, and freedom” as the main guiding concepts for their work, but he says that he intends for a lot of what they do to be quite radical, and admits that he’s not sure how that will work out. Survival and “medical” aspects of the game will be coming under a lot of scrutiny, creating greater depth for that “silent antagonist” part of the game. The groaning, brain-eating antagonists will be getting a revamp, as he discusses. Go watch.Read the rest of this entry »

One of numerous RPS interview victims at GamesCom was Bohemia bossman, Marek Spanel. The smiley Czech was keen to discuss the studio’s success, and to talk his upcoming projects: Arma III, and the Day Z standalone. We also touch on the importance of modding, that Operation Flashpoint was almost something like a post-apocalyptic Carrier Command, and why DirectX 9 can be dispensed with. As for Carrier Command itself, well, I am leaving what he said about that for another article. Read on for the rest.Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week I sat down with Day Z creator Dean Hall to talk about the new standalone game. Read on for information on why the mod version of the game will now “open up”, how dogs work, how original Op Flash developers came back to work on the new title, how “underground construction” might work, and for an explanation of why there won’t be a military simulator mod of Day Z. At least not yet.Read the rest of this entry »

I was just having a lovely chat with Dean Hall and Marek Spanel over at the BIS stand at GamesCom, and a couple of things emerged that I thought were interesting. Firstly, the Day Z standalone, which Hall anticipates arriving before the end of the year, could eventually have “instanced” building. Hall described how he saw the future of player-driven construction in the game consisting in underground bases that would be instanced from portals (“a grate in the ground”) across Chernarus. He described how players could dig it out, concrete it, building hydroponics, or even see it collapse on them. The second thing that was interesting is that Chernarus is being redone (“Chernarus Plus”) for the release with more enterable buildings, more detail, and even entirely new areas. New maps for the game will, apparently, be a major part of the plan for the standalone in the future.